iraq

David Simpson: "The Mourning Paper": May 7, 2004 [Comprehensive overview article]

"It is not news that all images are subject to both direct and self-imposed political and ideological control. Private Jessica Lynch, who had the independence of mind to resent the falsifications of her captivity narrative for propaganda purposes and the courage to say so, has also quietly disappeared from major-media sight. But the recent discussion is almost entirely limited to the rights and wrongs of exposing our dead to various kinds of public attention. [...] Before the Abu Ghraib prison photos it had been almost impossible to find in the US images of dead or suffering Iraqi civilians of the sort that the rest of the world had been seeing: equivalents of the famous Vietnam photo of a girl running screaming from a napalm attack that is thought to have done so much to affect the hearts and minds of Americans during that war. [...] Derrida and others have written perceptively of the degree to which 'they' are already 'us' - trained by us, often previously supported by us - so that the attack of the other is also significantly an attack by the 'self', an aggression that can be seen as coming from 'them' only by a political rhetoric committed to improbable absolutes. [...] war cannot easily survive the capacity to imagine oneself in the body of the other as well as in the bodies of our dead and dying. [...] The most troubling implication of this story is that it appears to be untypical. Few of us in the homeland are given any materials for imagining ourselves in the place and body of the other, a place where in so many ways we already are: this is the real symmetry between 9/11 then and Iraq today. [...] If this is indeed the society of the spectacle then mere exposure to more and more images will not of itself guarantee any meaningful sympathy with and for others. The photodocumentary task is not an end in itself, but it is a beginning. We will never know whether we are already numb, or need to numb ourselves, before images of death and duress unless we see them."
[London Review of Books]

Susan Sontag: "Regarding the Torture of Others" & Commentary

Susan Sontag: "Regarding the Torture of Others"
"Endless war: endless stream of photographs. [...] But the real push to limit the accessibility of the photographs will come from the continuing effort to protect the administration and cover up our misrule in Iraq -- to identify ''outrage'' over the photographs with a campaign to undermine American military might and the purposes it currently serves. [...] In our digital hall of mirrors, the pictures aren't going to go away. Yes, it seems that one picture is worth a thousand words. And even if our leaders choose not to look at them, there will be thousands more snapshots and videos. Unstoppable."
[New York Times Magazine: May 23, 2004]
[Also in The Guardian]
[Also in Truthout]

Andrew Sullivan: "Picture Frame"—Commentary on Sontag's "Regarding the Torture of Others"
[The New Republic]